


Farewell

by koalathebear



Series: The Expanse: Missing Scenes [12]
Category: The Expanse Series - James S. A. Corey
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Books, Character Death, F/M, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Canon, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-05
Updated: 2018-03-05
Packaged: 2019-03-26 07:10:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13852665
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/koalathebear/pseuds/koalathebear
Summary: Please do not read any further if you have not read the book Persepolis Rising of the Expanse series.  This fic contains spoilers from that book and earlier books.  You have been warned!!![spoiler space]Persepolis Rising really messed me up.  Clarissa Mao and Amos Burton are my favourite characters in the Expanse and even though I always suspected that her redemption arc would result in her death, it still didn't make it any easier for me.Also, after Nemesis Games, I wrote my own take of Clarissa's story arc where she actually gets a happy ending.   You can read that in my fic calledRedemption.  She does not die in that one :'(





	1. Two To Pick Up

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I wrote a prologue for my original fic. This is my rewrite of part of chapter 49 because I totally hated how the writers had the crew of the Roci handle the news of Clarissa's death. It blends my words in with text from the book.

"All right," Alex said. "Two to pick up, and then we can get in the flight queue out of this dump."

"One," Naomi said quietly. "Just one to pick up. We ran into a problem. Clarissa went down fighting. I wouldn't have made it out without her. None of us would..."

Bobbie's throat tightened immediately at Naomi's words. Her gaze sought out Amos immediately and he smiled his usual amiable smile and then he gave a small half shrug. Nonetheless, just for a moment, she saw something underneath his bland expression. She saw pain, loss and sorrow and rage. If she hadn't been watching so narrowly, she probably would have missed it, because in a second, his expression was back to normal. Uncommunicative and entirely without emotion.

"Damn," Alex said. "I'm sorry to hear that." His words seemed inadequate but his dark eyes were clouded with sorrow. He'd been fond of Clarissa. They all had.

After the brief exchange with Naomi, Bobbie turned off her mic and turned towards Amos who was pulling himself back toward the lift. At the lift, he stopped and scratched his nose, meeting her gaze steadily. "I was thinking, I should probably get a few of the new kids. Go through the ship. Just make sure we don't have anyone on board we didn't mean to have on the ride." His words were cool and matter-of-fact, like this was a day just like any other. Like the bottom of his world hadn't just fallen away and left him with a raw gaping wound where his soul had been. Clarissa had been the only person in the universe with the ability to evoke an uncharacteristic softness in Amos' eyes, a steady gentleness that in any other person would have been love.

For the very briefest of moments, Bobbie toyed with the idea of letting it go. Letting Amos fall back into his usual self. It would have been much, much easier. In a strange way, it would have felt more respectful to leave him alone with his private grief and in hear heart, Bobbie knew that it was what Holden would have done. He would have given Amos his space and he certainly wouldn't have tried to make the man talk about his feelings.

But Bobbie wasn't Holden. She'd never been like Holden and she never would be. "I need to know if you're ok," she told him bluntly.

"I don't really - "

Bobbie pulled herself in close to Amos so that they were almost nose to nose. She wasn't smiling and neither was Amos. She was going to force the issue even if it meant he was going to punch her in the face - as he had done in the past. "I didn't ask if you wanted to talk. I said, _I need to know_. Whatever ship I'm the captain of, if you're on it, that means you and I have clear, open and honest conversations about your mental health. This isn't friendship. This isn't nurturing. This is me telling you how it goes. We both know what happens when you're off the fails, and I'm not going to pretend that you're anything more or less than you are. So when I say I need to know if you're ok, it's an order. Are we clear?"

Amos' jaw clenched and his eyes went flat and dark. She suspected his hands were clenched into tight fists. Nonetheless, Bobbie did not back away. When Amos smiled, it wasn't the empty, amiable expression he usually reached for to mask his true feelings. It wasn't a version of Amos that she'd ever seen before in all the years she'd known him. She made a mental note to check with Naomi, who'd known him far longer.

"I'm sad, Babs. I'm angry. But I'm OK. Going down fighting was a good way for her to go too. I can live with it." He wasn't just telling her what she wanted to hear, he meant it.

Bobbie allowed herself to exhale slowly, release the tightness and return to normal. She was aware that her heart rate was a little quick, but she kept her expression calm. "All right, then. Take your team and go through the ship. I'll warn you when we're going on the burn."

"I'm on it," Amos said. "You know, you're gonna be good at this captain thing."

Bobbie grimaced. "Hope so."

Before leaving, he paused. "One thing ... if that's all right," Amos said, the slightest hint of hesitation in his voice.

"Whatever you need."

"Naomi said one to pick up. Make sure we pick up two."

"That's a given, Amos. Even if I have to go and get Claire myself," Bobbie told him fiercely and Amos smiled.


	2. Caring for Clarissa

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I was upset that the authors never gave Clarissa a proper farewell/burial etc ... so I decided to write one.

_Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love._  
\- George Eliot

Decades earlier, it had been Amos and Clarissa attending to the preparation of Fred Johnson's body together. He couldn't really recall how it had ended up that way, but as always, the two of them had been a good fit for the task. Amos had stripped Johnson of his clothes, and a no-nonsense Clarissa had cleaned the man's skin with a damp cloth. 

They hadn't spoken the whole time. Clarissa had washed Fred’s body with a calm, businesslike intimacy. Compassionate and entirely unsentimental. Amos had stepped in, helping to lift Fred when he needed to be moved and dressed in a fresh uniform and also when Clarissa needed to slide the body bag under the body. 

Amos could still remember the soft, almost mournful melody that Clarissa had hummed, recall the paleness of her thin face and the darkness of her huge eyes.

"We'll take care of him," she had told Holden softly.

“He was important,” Holden had replied, a catch in his voice and pain in his eyes.

Amos remembered that sorrow or amusement that had flickered in Clarissa’s eyes. Then again, Clarissa's eyes had always been a bittersweet mix of happiness and grief. Not now, though. Now they were closed forever.

"I’ve spent a lot of time with the dead. He’ll be okay now. You go take care of the ones that lived through it," she'd told Holden.

Now it was just Amos - and his little tomato. Naomi had wanted to help, after all Clarissa had saved her life. Bobbie had also wanted to help with the preparations – she was the captain. 

But Amos would allow no one else to assist him in this final task with Peaches ... This was his deal. He was going to sort it out. She would have wanted it that way. They'd been together for many years now ... he'd lost count of the years because to him it seemed like she'd always been a quiet, supportive presence by his side. During the worst of times, a small hand would slide into his and grip it tight, squeezing with surprising force and determination. She'd become the better side of him that he hadn't known existed – could exist.

Now he sat holding that very hand, cold, waxy and unresponsive. It was a hand he knew as well as his own ... slender and strong, the nails short and the fingertips calloused. They were clean for he had washed off the blood and Clarissa had always been scrupulous about washing the grease from her hands after she finished a task. 

With hands that remained strangely steady despite the burning sensation in his eyes, he had washed her body down … although his mouth had trembled slightly as he had washed the blood away from the wounds in her chest and her leg. She'd fought like a fucking demon before going down by the looks of it. 

In death, her body looked even tinier and more wasted than it had in life. More than thirty years of powerful toxins leaking into her fragile body ... But she'd never complained, despite the countless hours spent on the med bay couches, an autodoc cuff around her upper arm, her face tightening at each click. Injections and worse.

It had never been easy for him to watch. If he could have, Amos would have taken all the pain upon himself. Seeing Clarissa's suffering and her gradual decline had hurt Amos more than he could have thought possible. When her health had started to deteriorate, Amos had always been there by her side in the sick bay, keeping her company … even if it was just to sit at her side reading through his checklists and notes. Sometimes he'd tease her, distracting her from the life that was leaking from her inexorably.

"How much longer?" Bobbie had asked him once.

"Rest of her life," Amos had replied and he'd meant it. If she'd chosen to go to a nursing facility on Ceres, he'd have gone with her unquestioningly. She'd chosen to stay on the _Roci_ though and he'd blown all of his scrip on medicine to lessen her pain.

Clarissa had once described her suffering to him as her punishment and felt like she deserved it. She'd done it all to herself. The damage to her body, the wear and the weariness, were all products of conscious, determined choices made by a girl she hadn’t been in decades. She carried the weight of those decisions around with her, haunted by the actions of the past. There was no redemption for people like her.

"I'm a bad person. I'm still supposed to be in the Pit, remember? You saved me. Consider this karma's way of laughing at me," she told him once during one of the many bad episodes she'd had over the years.

"You're a good person Little Tomato," he had told her fiercely.

"I want to be a good person," she'd tell him steadily, her dark eyes huge and serious in her thin, pale face. 

Amos thought of the endless times she had comforted him with her crooked smile and rueful laugh. Times like that, he had glimpses of the girl she'd been before her world had fucked up and turned to shit. He thought of the countless cups of ginger tea and green tea that he had prepared for Clarissa to soothe her stomach when the nausea threatened to overwhelm her.

During the worst of it, he'd kept her going … made her eat when she wasn't keeping much down. Sat at her side as she stared at the food and tried to force herself to swallow one mouthful after another. 

_"What’re you up to?"_

_"I was going to go smear some food on my mouth like a toddler."_

_"Sounds good - I’ll go with you."_

He'd never thought of himself as the kind and nurturing kind, thought he could care so much… but thirty years with Clarissa had taught him something different. 

There had never been a mechanical or electronic issue the two of them hadn't been able to resolve between them. Spoken and unspoken communication. The years had created what the other members of the crew jokingly called telepathy given that the two of them seemed to barely talk when the others were around.

"Will ya hand me the - " Amos would start to say as Clarissa would put the screwdriver in his hand in anticipation of his request.

"I don't even know why you bother asking," Alex would comment when he'd sit and watch them work on his beloved _Roci_. There was occasionally a slightly wistful expression on his weathered face as he noted the familiarity and intimacy that had developed over decades of working side by side. Expressions that mirrored one another, phrases and habits that dovetailed and blurred into one another. The way she'd scowl and nod when they’d come to an agreement on something. There had been a few things about the _Roci_ that he knew better than she had, but those were few and far between. There were conversations he'd had with her that he couldn’t have with anybody else. 

And now she was gone.

After he had washed her body, Amos dressed Clarissa in a jumpsuit with _TACHI_ emblazoned on the back. She'd loved her assortment of grease monkey jumpsuits but the _TACHI_ ones had been her favourite, worn with proud at the acceptance she had finally obtained. His hands did tremble though when he placed her tool belt beside her. It was only at that point that he let the others come in, their faces drawn with grief and sympathy.

Alex smiled crookedly remembering how fiercely protective Claire had been of the _Roci_. "No one changes my environmental settings without my say-so." Her love of the battered old Martian gunship was as strong and unwavering as the rest of the crew's.

"She saved me … so brave and fierce … " Naomi whispered as she stood by Claire's side, staring down at the younger woman's quiet face, calm and unlined.

"Peaches would have wanted to go down fighting," Amos muttered as he combed the thick black hair as he had done many times before. This didn't feel like Clarissa anymore. It was a broken doll with Clarissa's face, empty of life and spirit but it had been her and remained precious beyond words to Amos. 

His words were true. The alternative, as they had discussed, would have been that it would have been Amos who ended her suffering. Put his hands around that slender throat and crushed the life out of that beautiful body. He'd promised her he would do it. She'd made him promise and he had sworn that it would be his hands that did it, that his face would have been the last face she saw before she died … He'd wanted her to be able to die on the _Roci_ with her family … It hadn't worked out that way… 

"One of the bravest fighters I ever met," Bobbie muttered, thinking back on Claire's ferocious tenacity in a fight. Her intense loyalty and determination. "Although she was also like an annoying know-it-all little sister…" She thought of Claire who had stubbornly quoted rules and procedure lists and assumed an air of protective formality.

"She never called you Roberta on purpose," Alex pointed out.

"Not so sure about that," Bobbie muttered. "Goodbye little sister," she said leaning down and brushing a kiss across Clarissa's cold cheek.

"She was a good kid ... always did her bit ... almost as good at flying the Roci as me. Not quite, though," Alex said with a crooked grin as he reached out and touched Claire's cold cheek lightly with his hand before closing his eyes briefly and muttering a quiet prayer. He had tears in his eyes, as did Naomi.

Amos watched as Naomi clipped a lock of Clarissa's hair, a faintly wondering expression on his face. They left him alone with her body for a time before returning to attend to the "burial".

*

"What's this?" Amos asked, staring down at small but heavy item placed in his hand by Naomi. He'd been sitting on his own beside the campfire, his shoulders hunched and his face distant. These days, he kept the bland, amiable smile on his face like a mask but his eyes were empty and his thoughts far away.

He turned the object in his hand. It looked for all the world like a compass of old from Earth - something entirely worthless when anywhere other than the Earth. It was fashioned from a heavy metal that he didn't recognise, and he could only assume that it was indigenous to Freehold. He looked up at Naomi unseeingly, the world spinning and she smiled at him, tears in her eyes. Reaching down she pressed a button and the object opened and inside was a series of images and a lock of black hair.

The first image was of the two of them in Engineering. Grease monkeys extraordinaire and in a rare moment, both were smiling for the image. It flicked to another image of all of them together … probably during one of the Tycho dockings … and another was Peaches on her own, a smile on her face as she looked past whoever was capturing the image at Amos.

"What ... what the ..." he muttered incoherently.

"She proved herself worthy of being a member of our crew time and time again ...most importantly - she was part of our family. We're all so sorry she's gone… "

Amos looked up, shock apparent in his face at her words. "That would have meant the world to her to hear you say that," Amos told her harshly. "I promised I'd be with her at the end ... promised that I'd be the one to take her life … " he closed his eyes for a moment. "I really fucked that up …"

"Not your fault, Amos …" Naomi told him, pain in her eyes.

"Tell me about … what happened …" he'd not asked her about Clarissa's last moments.

"We were captured … Clarissa didn't even talk to me about it, she activated her implants and killed the Laconians … she was shot a couple of times …" Naomi swallowed hard. "She was hurt real bad ... and the implants…"

"Yeah … they were deadly fuckers …"

"What did she say?"

_"I’m a monster…"_

_"No you aren’t, baby. You’re not a monster."_

"Then she closed her eyes and went to sleep in my arms, Amos …" Naomi told him and wiped the tears from her eyes.

"It was her mantra … _I have killed, but I am not a killer because a killer is a monster, and monsters aren’t afraid…_ She would have been glad she died protecting family," Amos told her fiercely, staring down unseeingly at the images of Clarissa in the compass.

Naomi put a hand on his shoulder for a moment and then left him alone. 

Amos exhaled slowly. At a different time he'd have gone and picked a fucking fight to end all fights with Babs … find a stranger to smash to pieces … Part of him wanted to howl at the sky but instead he stared down at the images of Clarissa and was almost able to smile.


End file.
